Messages about aging are ageless and abounding

Hermine Saunders, For Carroll Seniors

Astronaut John Glenn once said, "There is still no cure for the common birthday." Thinking about birthdays after one turns a certain age — I will soon turn 73 — can either bring joy or despair. I prefer joy, for as entertainer George Burns once said, "You can't help getting older, but you don't have to get old."

In fact, I am sure, as the notable financier and adviser to presidents, Bernard M. Baruch, said, "To me, old age is always 15 years older than I am."

Interestingly, many have been obsessed with aging, that force that seems to define all that has gone before in our lives and give us perspective on "the last of life, for which the first was made" (poetRobert Browning).

Some look upon aging in a humorous way. Poet Ogden Nash, for example, said that "You are only young once, but you can stay immature indefinitely." Perhaps English barrister and author Sir John Mortimer had it right when he said, "There is no pleasure worth forgoing just for an extra three years in the geriatric ward." In the same humorous vein, golfer Arnold Palmer said, "You know you're getting older when all the names in your black book have M.D. after them." Or similarly but ironically, "Old age is a lot of crossed-off names in an address book," according to the English writer Ronald Blythe.

Henry Ford, industrialist and founder of the Ford Motor Company, took the more serious tact: "Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at 20 or 80." For Henry David Thoreau, American author and transcendentalist, "None are so old as those who have outlived enthusiasm." Perhaps T.S. Eliot, the literary giant, said it best: "I don't believe one grows older. I think that what happens ... is that at a certain age one stands still and stagnates."

Let's not stand still and stagnate; there is so much we must still accomplish, regardless of the years. We may be in our "prime" since time is a concept that humans created. What about all those volunteer services we can provide? What about learning another language or a new dance step? What about writing that "great American novel"? What about campaigning and crusading for any number of just and righteous causes? What about working for and giving to a charity that can change peoples' lives? What about — you fill in the blank!

Instead of regretting birthdays as they come around faster and faster, let us, with an unknown author, "not regret growing older; it is a privilege denied to many." Rather, we should take heart from Samuel Ullman's poem "Youth," loved and quoted often by Gen. Douglas MacArthur: "But so long as your heart receives messages of beauty, cheer, courage, grandeur and power from the earth, from man and from the Infinite, so long you are young."